Transmission: Pi

Published 29th June 2015 by TBSliver

So regularly, I find myself needing another install disk for a particular Linux distribution – be this for a desktop, a server, or a Raspberry Pi. Which means that I have, at any one time, atleast 2 downloads for various Linux distros on any one particular machine I use… although it is rarely the one which I want. This is a big issue at times, depending on the size of the installer – A generic installer for the Raspberry Pi alone of just Raspbian is 1.03Gb. This adds up to about 10 – 15 minutes on a decent connection, but could mean an hour or two somewhere else. So it is probably worth having a Torrent Client constantly running.

Using a desktop, or server is an option for this, however for something which is not going to be doing a whole lot of heavy lifting, they seem like a bit overkill for always on – also the power cost is fairly huge for something like that too. Enter the Raspberry Pi.

On its own, however there is little use trying to use a Pi for this. Most people only use an 8Gb card for the main OS, and that isnt much for 1Gb install images. So an external hard drive is also a must.

The final thing you will want is a wired connection for your Pi, unless you are completely insane and want a wireless thing… yea lets not go there, you’re already reading this blog!

So, the parts list:

Raspberry Pi (B, B+, or 2 – one with an ethernet port)

Memory card with Raspbian installed

External HDD – I’m using a 1TB 2.5″ Samsung USB drive

Ethernet connection to your home/office network

Putting it together

So the first thing to do is wire it all together. I’m not going to insult you by showing you how to do that, however do check you get the USB the right way up on the 3rd try. You will also want to set up the Pi with ssh access, and probably your own username and password access. You will also probably want the external HDD to automatically mount on boot.

Mount a HDD on boot

To get a drive to automatically mount on Boot, you will want to add it to /etc/fstab so that it can be correctly identified. When you plug your drive in, it will be assigned a device name similar to /dev/sda1 which corresponds to the first partition on the sda device. If you have multiple devices, and also multiple partitions on a device, then this is not guaranteed between reboots of your machine – one of the other devices may respond quicker the next time round. What you should use instead is the devices UUID, or unique identifier, which you can find out using the assigned name. To find out the assigned name, you can use fdisk -l. This will need to be run as sudo or the root user, and should give an output something like this:

From this you can see the that there are two devices, one with two partitions (/dev/mmcblk0) and another device with one partition (/dev/sda). The next step is to search for the device by ID, looking for the partition you want – in my case its /dev/sda1.

To find the UUID’s available, run ls -la /dev/disk/by-uuid – you will get an output similar to the following:

From this i can see that the UUID is d4f121eb-8b3f-44b9-b886-aa020032adc9 for that partition. This can then be used in /etc/fstab. The next step is to create a mounting point for it, which I will create at /media/Tardis (an ongoing theme of my HDD’s) with the command sudo mkdir /media/Tardis. The final things you need to know are the filesystem used on the device (in my case its ext4). So I will edit mine to look like the following:

There are many more options you can add to this, so its well worth reading the man page for fstab – run man fstab to read this.

Installing Transmission

The application we will be using for this is called Transmission. It is quite a lightweight Linux based Bittorent client, and actually has a non-gui option in the form of a daemon. So lets install it:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install transmission-daemon

Now we have the basic transmission daemon installed, stop the process so we can change a few settings. One thing to note about transmission-daemon is that if you change any settings, then try and to a restart it will overwrite your changes with new ones. You will have to do a reload to get it to fully reload the settings from the file. So the best bet is to just stop it at the moment, and start it again when we’ve finished:

sudo service transmission-daemon stop

Now we want to change a few of the settings. These are stored in /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json. But first, we should create a directory to put the downloaded files in. For this, change to the directory you mounted your external HDD at earlier, and make a few directories, assigning them the correct user and group:

This has now created the folders we will point Transmission at for downloading, and they will all exist on our external HDD, saving the space on the SD card. So now, open up the settings file with your favourite editor (mine is vim) – you will have to do this as root or with sudo, for example sudo vim /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json. From here, you can change the following lines:

Here you can see we have set the download dir to one we created earlier (the finished directory), and also set up a seperate incomplete directory (called downloading) for torrents in progress. This saves having a bit of a mess in the main download directory – You have to enable tihs option, hence the incomplete-dir-enabled option.

The other things to note are the rpc options. Note the password is plaintext – this is only like this until you start transmission again, at which point it hashes the password in this file. I have also changed the rpc-whitelist to include my local network, otherwise it will deny your conections. The final thing is the username, which im obviously going to use as mine.

After this is changed, there are a few other settings which may be worth sorting, however these are easiest done through the web interface. So now you can start the daemon:

sudo service transmission-daemon start

And then go to the IP address of the Pi, on port 9091 (by default). For me this was 192.168.0.130:9091, which then asked me for the username and password I set earlier. After that, it should give you a standard Transmission window in your browser!

Batten Down The Hatches

The final few steps are just minor belt-and-braces parts, best practices I have found when using always on Torrent Clients. The first is, ENABLE ENCRYPTION. Even if all your torrents are legal ones, I find its best to just enable this – go to the settings window by clicking the button in the bottom left with the spanner on, and go to the Peers tab. In the dropdown menu, select Require encryption.

The other thing I have done is to throttle the client during normal internet hours, which for my house is between 8AM and 1AM. For that, go to the Speed tab in the settings window, and set a reasonable Upload and Download speed for during the day – this all depends on your local internet connection. Then tick the Scheduled Times box, and pick a set of times and frequency which suits you. This way, when most people are using the internet, its not going to wipe everyones bandwidth out, and when its out of hours then it can just download as fast as it wants.

And There We Go!

Well, that was longer than I expected, however its still a useful tutorial on how to set up a web only Transmission client. There is obviously more which can be done for this, and if people would like to know more or have questions, please ask in the Disqus section below! Guest comments are allowed, however abuse of this feature will mean I break your fingers with a cricket bat. Oh, and also turn it off. So you’ve been warned! But comments and criticisms, hints and tips are all welcome.